by Unknown
Stella visited the bottle of Johnnie Walker Black before her date, just to make sure there was enough left for a powerful belt before bed. She unscrewed the top and inhaled—held it—then replaced the cap with a mild sense of regret. She was running low—and that was an errand she couldn’t put off. Johnnie was a staple item in Stella’s pantry.
But she never drank before her standing Sunday night date with Todd Groffe. It would be bad form, since he couldn’t join her, being thirteen and all.
Todd let himself in the front door without knocking at a little after seven. “Damn them damn girls,” he said by way of greeting.
“What’d they do this time?” Stella asked, getting a couple of cans of Red Bull out of the fridge and tearing open a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
“Got in my dresser and got my damn boxers and they’re wearin’ ’em around the house over their clothes and shit. And Mom thinks it’s cute so she won’t make them take ’em off. She’s all like taking their pictures and stuff.”
Todd’s twin sisters were six. Stella, like everyone else in the world besides Todd, thought they were adorable. Todd’s father wasn’t in the picture anymore, and his mother, Sherilee, worked long hours during the week and brought work home on the weekend. They lived in a little house a few doors down from Stella, and Sherilee had a hard time with the upkeep on the place, not to mention paying the mortgage.
But on Saturdays Sherilee got the girls a sitter and took Todd out on the town. Stella admired her for that. Sherilee took her son to Burger King, to action movies, to play paintball. They went to Wal-Mart and played laser tag and mini golf.
Sunday night it was the girls’ turn, and Todd came over to Stella’s. They shared a secret passion: they were both America’s Next Top Model junkies. Stella TiVoed the show, and she and Todd ate junk food and critiqued the outfits and the judging and tried to figure out who was really nice and who was just pretending to get along with the other girls. Meanwhile, Sherilee took the girls to Disney movies and Pizza Hut and Fantastic Sams and Sears.
Tonight, though, Stella had a hard time concentrating on Tyra and her crew as they shuttled the models through a photo shoot in what looked like a muddy jungle. Her thoughts kept going back to Roy Dean and his insolent, stupid expression as he denied that he was seeing a new girl.
She had a bad feeling about this one. He might turn out to be one of the ones who required creative thinking, a step up to an intensified program of discouragement.
Stella didn’t relish this aspect of the job—the turning of the screw, the dialing up of the pressure, the creation of new varieties and levels of pain. She understood that there were people in the world—plenty of them—who got their kicks from hurting others, who experienced a rush of pleasure to see other human beings contorted in agony. Heck, if she were to advertise for an assistant—someone to wield the whip or rubber hose or cattle prod or pliers or lit cigarette so she could keep her hands clean—she’d probably have applicants lined up out the door.
But her business didn’t work that way. Stella knew too much about pain—the kind inflicted on the innocent, the defenseless, those whose worst sins were bad judgment and displaced loyalty. And she’d pledged to stop it. Not every abuser, everywhere—there were simply too many. But if it was in her power to help a woman in Sawyer County, she did so. And gradually word reached sisters and cousins and best friends and acquaintances further afield, down through the Ozarks and up to Kansas City and over to Saint Louis and—as the months grew to years and Stella learned how to turn vicious and conscience-deficient men into cowering repenters—across state lines.
Stella picked off the sons-of-bitches one by one, leaving their women free to breathe easy, to live without dread as their constant companion. And now this sideline threatened to overtake her real job, the shop she’d inherited from Ollie, supplying the women of Prosper with sewing notions and keeping their sewing machines in good working order. Every time she thought she’d earned some time off, a new woman would show up, terrified or battered or both, but finally ready to make it stop. And Stella knew what kind of courage that took—and she never turned a client away.
Though she did daydream about the day when the world straightened itself out, when the last abuser met his doom and she could go back to selling sewing machines and thread and needles full-time. Keep her highlights fresh and her nails done. Work in the garden. Bake banana bread.
Go on an occasional date with a real man.
Todd yawned and zapped the TV off with the clicker. He grabbed a last handful of Cheetos and jammed them all in his mouth at once. While he was chewing, Stella collected the Red Bull cans and folded the crocheted afghans and brushed a few crumbs off the couch.
“See ya,” Todd said, wiping his orange fingers on his baggy shorts.
“Thank you very much for inviting me, Miz Hardesty,” Stella said.
“Yeah, whatever. Bye, Stella.”
Stella waited a few moments after Todd left, then eased the front door open and watched him skateboard down the street to his house, holding his helmet loosely by the strap, pushing off with his foot and leaping up onto the curb and back down with grace. She waited until he slipped into his own front door, using the key he wore on a shoelace around his neck, before she went back inside.
Just two doors down, but the world was a dangerous place. Anything could happen.
Good folks had to look out for one another.
One of the biggest rip-offs in the universe had to be when the pleasant buzz you took to bed with you at midnight turned itself into queasy can’t-sleep at 5 A.M. Where the hell did all that lovely sparkle go?
Stella had drained the Johnnie. She hadn’t really intended to, but some nights were like that. Some nights were for thinkin’ and drinkin’, when it seemed like you couldn’t do one without the other.
Stella rarely drank in the days before Ollie died. She’d figured that someone in the house ought to stay sober, and Ollie frequently wasn’t up to the job.
The Johnnie thing—she’d discovered Johnnie Walker Black a few weeks into her new life as a widow and was so grateful for the way it took the edge off that she started spending more and more time with the bottle. There was a stretch there, four or five months, that didn’t bear recalling—even if she could remember anything through the whiskey haze.
But these days her relationship with Johnnie was more measured. Once Stella took up exercise, jogging around the neighborhood and dragging Ollie’s barely used Bowflex out of storage, she didn’t need the alcohol-induced numbing as much. Just the nightly drink, or occasionally two . . . except for the rare night when two didn’t do the trick. When she needed an extra layer of fuzzy loveliness.
If only she could skip the early-morning sleeplessness that always followed.
In those pre-dawn hours Stella sometimes amused herself by imagining how she would do in the joint. It was luck more than anything that had kept the law from investigating her sideline business, but her luck couldn’t hold forever. Eventually, one of her parolees would decide to roll the dice and turn her in. Or the long arm of the law would somehow get wise enough to catch her in the act of rehabilitating a subject. Either way, questions would be asked. Leads would be followed. And when that happened, odds were good that Stella would be headed for jail.
Stella wasn’t sure she much cared. Life with Ollie had been worse than anything the prison system could dish out. Life without Ollie was better, but it was still lonely. Becoming a stone-cold enforcer had changed her, taking away any desire she’d ever had to play nice just to fit in. She called it like she saw it now. Cussed when she felt like it. Didn’t back down.
Jail didn’t scare Stella. With an assault conviction or two, she figured her reputation would precede her. Her nickname would be some variation on Hardesty, probably “Hard-ass.” Of course you didn’t get a handle like that for free; she’d probably have to shank somebody on the first day or something.
But then there was the matter of all the pair
ing-off that happened in women’s prison. She’d seen a TV documentary on the subject. Diane Sawyer, Stella’s favorite journalist, spent the night in jail, wearing a prison-issue jumpsuit to interview the inmates. Stella couldn’t believe how matter-of-fact the women were about their sex lives. And how creative, too, making sex toys out of bits of junk stolen here and there.
Unfortunately, Stella was pretty sure she didn’t have any latent lesbian tendencies, so all that prison action wouldn’t do her much good. It was a shame, too, because the documentary made it clear that even the homelier ladies had opportunities for love.
Stella was no beauty queen. Despite the hours she spent on the Bowflex, her muscles were still protected by a generous larding of extra pounds. Then there were the gray roots, the facial hair in odd places, the breasts heading to the equator.
But on TV she’d seen it with her own eyes: gals who didn’t have anything on her—hell, downright old, ugly gals with no access to a blow-dryer—enthusiastically reporting all the lovin’ they were getting. Diane didn’t back down, either. She listened with polite interest. She didn’t judge. Stella admired her for keeping her cool.
Diane, who made even prison duds look elegant, hadn’t seen fifty in a while herself, but she had a sort of mature sensuality that implied she’d done more in the sack than most people even dream about. She probably had mind-blowing sex five days a week.
Stella figured she might miss sex more if it had been any good when she had it.
Fucking Ollie. That thought, never far from her mind, and in a thousand different contexts, brought unexpected tears to Stella’s eyes as she lay there in the bed she’d once shared with him. This time, it was simply because he’d been such an incredibly worthless lay. All those years . . . all that bad sex. That wasn’t even in the top five reasons why he’d deserved what he got, but still, Stella found herself immensely sad to think of how many times she’d lain in this bed with Ollie laboring over her like a man stuffing fiberglass insulation between roof joists on a sweltering day.
Of course, it wasn’t like he had an overabundance of insulation to work with. That wayward thought cracked Stella up a little, so that when she did finally manage to fall back into a brief but deep sleep, she did so with a smile on her face and tears dried to salty tracks on her cheeks.
TWO
Monday went by slowly. Stella roamed the shop floor restlessly, her head throbbing and her mouth cottony. She ordered a pizza for lunch and, after promising herself she’d eat only half and take the rest home for leftovers, nibbled it down to a few crusts over the course of the afternoon.
Hardesty Sewing Machine Sales & Repair did the same languid business it always had. There had been a steady trickle of customers when Ollie ran the place, and there was a steady trickle now. The only difference was that Ollie used to fix the machines himself; now, a man came in and picked them up once a week and returned them a few days later, running better than Ollie had ever managed.
Stella made small talk while she handled the day’s few sales, and tried to keep herself awake by dusting and polishing and straightening the stock, until it was finally time to close up and go home. After a dinner of an apple and half a bag of carrots—penance for the pizza—Stella fell asleep watching CNN, woke up after eight dreamless hours, and switched to Good Morning America. For a while she was content to watch Diane Sawyer sideways, checking the tourists holding signs, as she always did, for anyone from Missouri. On the rare occasion when one of her fellow Missourians made it all the way to Rockefeller Center, Stella felt both proud and wistful; the farthest east she’d ever been was a high school trip to Philadelphia, back when they still had the Liberty Bell out where you could see it close-up.
Diane had on a fungus green jacket today, and a section of her hair, the part that was supposed to fall coquettishly above one eye, was doing something a little strange, winging out at an angle. “Not your best look,” Stella murmured at the television. But kindly: she could relate.
Stella decided it would be a day of hard work. She had a banana for breakfast and got to work in earnest. She put the laundry in the dryer and collected all the dirty sheets and towels and the remaining dirty clothes and sorted them. The sight of the color-coded piles made her feel pleasantly efficient.
She’d been a competent homemaker. As a young mother, she’d kept a spotless house, dressed her daughter Noelle in clean, pressed little outfits, with her hair in ribbons to match. She’d baked elaborate cakes for church fund-raisers, slipcovered all the furniture herself, vacuumed the drapes regularly, and dusted twice a week.
Now, with two businesses to run, she’d let the place slide. Usually it didn’t bother her. In fact, it still felt decadent and rebellious. Occasionally, though, Stella spent a whole day cleaning the place from top to bottom.
Today would have been such a day. Except that around ten thirty, the doorbell rang. Stella peeled off her yellow rubber gloves and set down the bucket of soapy water and the brush she’d been using to scrub the kitchen floor, and answered the door.
Chrissy Shaw stood on her front porch wearing a strappy purple top that showed off her pillowy breasts as well as the fading bruises along her shoulders and upper arms. She crossed her arms over her chest and shifted from one high platform sandal to the other, her face swollen from crying.
Stella’s heart sank. She hadn’t expected to see the girl for a while. Usually, her clients stayed away after a job. She didn’t take it personally—they usually just needed to distance themselves. Not everyone was as comfortable dishing out Stella’s brand of justice as she was. No matter how relieved they were with the results, it could be a messy business.
When a client came back this quick it usually meant something had gone wrong.
“Is Roy Dean bothering you?” Stella demanded, holding the door wide for Chrissy to enter.
“No’m,” Chrissy mumbled. She had on tight denim shorts that barely covered her jiggly rear, and she tugged at the fringed hems as she clopped past Stella. She trailed some kind of perfume that smelled like it came out of one of those peel-and-rub ads in Cosmopolitan magazine—a little musky, a little papery. Could be the girl had just spritzed on a little over-much to cover up skipping today’s shower; Stella employed that technique herself from time to time.
Chrissy walked into Stella’s living room and lost her momentum. She turned to the couch, the love seat, Ollie’s old La-Z-Boy and considered each one, but couldn’t seem to make up her mind. She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead and managed a pathetic little whimper. Chrissy was in her middle twenties, but if you didn’t know better you might guess she was eighteen.
“Hell, sugar, don’t matter where you plant your butt, we’ll still be having the same conversation,” Stella said. “Tell you what, while you’re deciding, why don’t I get us some iced tea.”
When she came back with the tray a few minutes later, Chrissy had slumped low in the love seat and was leaking tears down her plump cheeks, pale blond hair sticking to her sweat-damp skin. Her wide blue eyes were ringed with smudgy mascara.
“Oh, dear,” Stella said. “I know it seems bad now, but whatever Roy Dean’s done, it’s nowhere near the worst problem someone’s come here to talk about. Nothing I can’t help you fix, anyway.”
Chrissy wiped her nose along her knuckles and sniffled. “Yeah? Well, guess what, I think this time I might a brung you a problem you ain’t had before.”
Stella sat down on the couch and picked up a long silver spoon off the tray and gave her glass of tea a swirl. Oh, these girls. Every one of them sure they had a new story to tell. Honestly, it tried her patience sometimes, until she remembered what it felt like to be in their shoes. When you were the one getting smacked around, trash-talked, cheated on, and generally treated worse than any man would treat a tick-infested hound dog, then yeah, your story seemed like the most singular piece of news on earth.
“Is that right, dolly.” Stella screwed down the lid on her impatience and settled in to hear
the whole story. “Well, you tell me all about it, and then we’ll figure out what to do. But here, wet your whistle before you get rolling.”
Chrissy accepted a glass of tea but set it down on the table without sipping. “Roy Dean’s gone and run off.”
“Now honey, he isn’t gone, he’s just been staying out at a trailer down close to Shooter’s Cove,” Stella said, wondering if the girl had been foolish enough to go looking for him. Sometimes, even after suffering all manner of abuse, her clients had second thoughts. “But there’s no need to go stirring things up.”
“Ain’t Roy Dean I care about, Stella—only just he’s taken Tucker. Came and took him yesterday morning. Told me he wanted his hibachi back and when I went around back to get it, I guess that’s when he got Tucker ’cause when I came back inside they was both gone.” Chrissy snuffled and dabbed at her eyes, smearing her makeup further.
“Oh no,” Stella said, setting her own glass down and jerking to attention. “That does change things. Shit!”
“Yeah,” Chrissy said, and her glum expression slipped further and a shadow of terrible worry flashed across her doughy features. “That’s about the size of it.”
Stella excused herself, making sure that the plate of Oreos was in Chrissy’s easy reach, and called Sheriff Goat Jones from the kitchen. She was one of only a handful of people with direct access to the sheriff’s mobile number, and that was a result of her only case that had gone terribly wrong, a failure from which Stella would never entirely recover.
Two years back, Lorelle Cavenaugh went missing less than a week after she came to Stella for help. Stella spent forty straight hours searching for Lorelle on her own before calling the sheriff. She invented a story about them being third cousins and Lorelle leaving a terrified message on her machine, which she had just happened to erase, and which oddly didn’t show up in the phone company records.
By the time they found Lorelle, stuffed head-down into a rain barrel at Jack Cavenaugh’s fishing cabin, Stella had promised herself that she’d never again let anything get in the way of a woman’s safety. Not even if it meant danger to herself, or exposure, or bringing in the entire sheriff’s department.